The Psychology of Thought Leadership: Why Publishing Matters

Hi, friends and fellow future authors, this is Lynn “Elikqitie” Smargis. I am the ghost writer at Unicorn Publishing Company and book editor, and I'm glad to bring you this podcast, another episode of Publishing for Professionals. Today is episode 15, and today the topic is going to be the psychology of thought leadership, why publishing matters, and this is really interesting because a lot of people they're out there that are thought leaders a bunch of them don't have books, right, and that's a really easy way to distinguish yourself as a thought leader is to have a book. But before we jump into today's episode, I want to remind you just to make sure to hit that follow or subscribe button wherever you're at, because I have a special gift coming up for people who are going to join the Publishing for Professionals community and I'll tell you about that at the end of the episode. All right, so today we're going to talk about again the psychology of thought leadership, why publishing matters, and we're going to explore the psychological aspects of thought leadership and why publishing is such a critical component of thought leadership, and we're going to talk about the key insights that you're going to get. Today is influence. We're going to talk about credibility and professional growth. So part one let's talk about the first part here is defining thought leadership.

01:30

Okay, so, what is thought leadership and what constitutes genuine thought leadership versus self-promotion? Okay so self-promotion is basically you're out there saying this is what I have and this is what I offer, right? So self-promotion for me would be like I'm a ghostwriter. I'm a book editor. I can help you self-publish your book, but my thought leadership is this is the best way to self-publish your book. Excuse me, this is how you can get your book self-published in 90 days or less. This is how. This is the most effective and efficient way to write and publish your book. Okay, those are thought leadership topics. Okay, why? But the, the services that you offer and telling people about them that's self-promotion. Okay, so self-promotion just means you're talking about yourself and what you offer and what you can do, but thought leadership is saying how you distinguish yourself from everybody else. Okay, so I distinguish my publishing company from all the other ones, because I've seen how creatives get taken by hybrid publishing and especially traditional publishers. Okay, how they spend lots and lots of money in all these programs and they don't come out with a good published book because the program isn't well built or it isn't well written. So my thought leadership aspect is is I am a publishing company that helps people, works with people, walks them through self-publishing your book, saving you a bunch of time and money and effort, and you're on the right path. You skip over all of those pitfalls that people commonly come across when they're self-publishing their book. That's the difference.

03:01

The psychological impact of being perceived as an authority in your field is huge, okay, and you can see that. No matter where you go, like there's no matter what field, no matter what if it's, you know, spiritual, health and wellness business, no matter what vertical you're in, you can see who is perceived as an authority in their field. And how can you see that? Well, number one, the easiest way is to see how many followers they have, right, and also to go on there and see what is it that they're talking about. Usually it's some niche topic Like, for instance, one of the YouTube channels I follow is the Jen Hardy channel and she does a lot of like interviews of judges and things like that. Okay, she does kind of like it's not true crime, but she does like judges and talks about like crime and interviews like prisoners and things like that. So that's really interesting.

03:48

Another one I followed that I really love is called Master Sri R Kasana, and he talks about manifesting things. Okay, and specifically like how you can manifest things in your life and the difference between, like, what people generally misbelieve and what is actually. You know the truth about manifesting things in your life. So that's really important, okay. So what are they talking about? How many followers do they have? More importantly, how engaged are those followers? Okay, so if you see, like, a video that has a thousand likes but no one's commented on it, then people aren't really engaged in that video or that topic. Okay. So if you see them, but they have a lot of high engagement and there's people are writing comments on the left and right, then look at that video. Why do you think that that person's being a thought leader and having so many comments on their video? Okay, all right.

04:35

So the how the brain processes information from perceived experts differently. So if you perceive somebody as an expert, they automatically have your trust, and automatically having your trust means you're going to believe what they say, and so that's really important, because if you're not perceived as a thought leader, people won't automatically or be more inclined to believe what you say. You need to be positioned as a thought leader, and having a book is one of those ways to be positioned as a thought leader, because you can say, oh, I write this book on XYZ subject and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and you'll find my thoughts in here. Okay, so that's a great way to be perceived as a thought leader. Okay, so next part, we're going to talk about the trust equation.

05:15

Okay, we briefly touched on this in the last section, but we're going to talk about the breakdown of trust components. Okay, first, there's credibility, so there's four of them. Credibility components okay, first there's credibility, so there's four of them credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation. So credibility is one. How trustworthy is this person? Okay, is what they're saying believable? I mean, there's people out there saying all sorts of things, but is what this person is saying, is their message believable? Does it make sense? Does it? Also, you know, check out with other things other people are saying if this person's an outlier and they're saying some completely different message and everybody else is in their vertical, then maybe that's not so trustworthy, right? So you need to see what they're saying, how they're saying it and if it's believable, okay, and also obviously, always double check with a legitimate resource. Okay, you want to make sure that the resource you're checking with is legitimate and it has good data behind it.

06:09

Okay, the next breakdown of trust components is reliability. Is this person going to be showing up on their podcast platform, on their YouTube channel, wherever it is they do their podcast? Is this person going to show up consistently? Is this person going to be answering messages? Okay, or are they having their VA answering messages? Okay, one of the things I always do is I personally answer all my emails and social media messages. I don't have my VA do that. I have heard you a lot of other things, but that's not one of the things I have my VA do. Okay, I write my own emails. I respond to all my own messages. Okay, that's showing up and that's being reliable for my listeners. Okay, intimacy Is this person connecting with you when you're hearing their voice, when you're hearing my voice, am I connecting with you? I would love to know. Please let me know by going to my website, rightforyoume, and sending me a message. Am I connecting with you? If not, what could I connect with you better on? I would love to know. Okay, so that's intimacy, how you're connecting with people. All right.

07:05

Next one we're talking about is self-orientation, right? How does that person position themselves relative to other people? Okay, how is their personal brand and how is their personality accentuating their brand, their business brand? All right, so I have a very bubbly and energetic personality and my publishing company is Unicorn Publishing Company. So I play into that because I love magic and I love all things magic and exciting and insightful things and all the things about, you know, energy and manifesting things. So that all plays in. All these personal things play into my business brand, which is Unicorn Publishing Company, which is helping people. I work with people to magically self-publish their books in 90 days or less. It's almost like magic. So all of these things credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation Publishing strengthens each of those elements of trust, because one to make a published book takes a lot of work and effort, right?

08:10

So you know, if someone is publishing a book, they are reliable. Okay, it makes you look credible, even if the information in that book isn't always accurate, but it makes you look credible because you've put all this time and effort into it and, at a minimum, you believe that this is true. So if you're publishing it, then that's a minimum thing of credibility. Right, you have published this book and you are showing it to the world, so that has some minimal level of credibility to it. Just publishing the book, of course, the content inside it is a whole nother level of credibility.

08:38

Okay, this, this, this the psychological principle of mere exposure effect and how consistent publishing leverages it All right. So consistent publishing like if you're publishing your book, or if you publish one book, right, and then you take that content and repurpose it into Substack or Medium articles or articles on your blog or wherever that is that's really important because people are showing, you're showing up and you're exposing yourself to people all over the place with your message, okay, and it takes now 10 to 12 times for people to actually kind of reach out to you or really get your message. Okay, so that's really important because you need to know that when you're putting out content, how many times a week does that person have to see it? How many times a week do you need to put out that content for it? So you need to expose people to your content. You don't have to publish multiple books, but you can use your book chapters and repurpose them into content to help with your exposure effect. All right, interview clip or quote from a psych Interview clip or quote is a great way to repurpose your material, especially if you're doing video, or even if you're doing audio. You can repurpose a quote on an an audio file and make it a video. So there's lots of different ways to do that, okay.

09:55

So let's talk about the next topic, which is cognitive biases at work. Okay, so what is a cognitive bias? So, a cognitive bias is something that we inherently trust or something we inherently don't trust. So, for example, authority, authority bias. Ok, why do we inherently trust published authors more? Why is that? Because we can see they're publishing multiple books. And if they're publishing multiple books, that means they must have something right going on.

10:22

And that's what we think. Even if that published author isn't a great author, but they're publishing multiple books, we think. We first think, oh, they must be a good, a great author, but they're publishing multiple books. We we think. We first think, oh, they must be a good, a famous author because they published more than one book. Okay, or they must be a good author because they published more than one book. So that's something to take into account.

10:40

Another thing is social proof, how publishing creates a snowball effect of credibility. So you see all these people following this author, you see them commenting on their streams or feeds and that is definitely social proof. The halo effect how expertise in one area, demonstrated through publishing, extends to perception of overall competence. So, for example, I'm a published author but I'm also a podcaster. So if you like my podcast, you may think, hmm, she might be a good author. And, conversely, if you have found me through one of my books, you can say, oh, I liked her book. Maybe Lynn, like Whitney, has a great podcast. Okay, so that trust can transform over into different platforms. So if somebody is on your email list and you say, hey, this is my sub stack, come and follow me and they love reading your email list, chances are they're going to love reading your Substack, so they're going to follow you there. I recently did that actually recently, a few months ago with my Substack, and I have a half of my people that I invited come over to my Substack and now I'm getting some independent people following my Substack as well. So definitely check that out. Okay.

11:47

Practical ways professionals can ethically leverage these biases. Of course, always be genuine and authentic. You know, don't be ungenuine or unauthentic in your talking about different leveraging these platforms. Okay, be honest. And I always just tell people you know, to be honest in your content is great. You have to do that in order to establish a reputation that people are going to believe and be consistent in your message, right? Don't go around saying like one message one day and then two weeks later completely change your message. Now, tweaking it a bit is one thing, but you want to make sure you have the same message, especially if you're doing book marketing. All right, my friends, we're going to take a break right here, but when we come back we're going to talk about some more different ways you can exercise the psychology of thought leadership and why publishing matters in these.

12:57

Hi Lynn Aliquity, back for part two of the Publishing for Professionals, episode 15. And today we are talking about the psychology of thought leadership, why publishing matters. So psychological benefits for the author are imposter syndrome reduction. Okay, so when you publish unless you don't sell any books which I've only heard one author do that, but he didn't want to sell any books, so that was a fine for him but once you publish, then you'll be like okay, now you can start to feel better about getting past the imposter syndrome, and if you don't know what that is, a lot of us have experienced it. It's basically like where you feel like you're not good enough to be an author, you're not good enough to be that podcaster, you're not good enough to have a YouTube channel because no one's going to listen to what you're going to say. Okay, so if you are an expert in your field and you know you have years of experience behind you, definitely jump on that bandwagon and you are not an imposter. If you have experience and knowledge and information to share with people A lot of people you would be surprised how many people are on step one of whatever the expertise is that you have. So if you have step five, six or seven, you're six steps ahead of the other people. So keep that in mind.

14:07

Cognitive clarity gained through the writing and publishing process is enormous. All of my clients say this. They say, oh my gosh, the more I write, the more better ideas I have. The more better ideas I have, the more I can fill in the blank. So the more you write, the more of the old information you get out of your head and the new information starts coming in, which is really good, because then you can get some more writing and publishing in. You get more ideas, you get new ideas, which is really the benefit from writing Identity reinforcement.

14:36

How becoming an author changes your self-perception. I cannot tell you how many times I have given somebody a signed copy of my book and the look on their they literally the look on their face. Their face lights up and they're like, oh my gosh, you're giving me a copy of your book, like it's so exciting for them. And a lot of times they'll text the picture and send it to a friend and the friend will go and buy it online. So it's really really, really a powerful position to be an author or say I'm an author, this is my book, and sign a book and give it to somebody because that copy, that connection with that person, is incredible. You have just made a connection with a person that very few people can make by signing a copy of your book and giving it to somebody. Or even if they're buying it and you're signing it, right, it's so exciting to sign, get a signed book from an author. I mean, if you have ever received a signed book from an author, think about how you felt and think about the flip of that, right, how was that person going to feel when they get a signed copy of your book?

15:32

The unexpected psychological rewards reported by first-time authors there's so many of them, there's a lot, way too many to list just in one episode, but I know some of my own personal ones are just a sense of satisfaction and achievement being an authority in the field, people having a level of respect for you because you have published a book. So in my book, the Guide to Traveling Gluten-Free, I used to go to gluten-free trade shows to promote the book and sell it and people come up and be like, oh my gosh, this is from your experience. You had all these experiences you wrote in this book. You didn't just go on a bunch of blogs and take the information off of it and I'm like, no, this is all from personal experience I had. And immediately they buy my book. And so to know that you're sharing that personal information with them, that experience, that advice, that professionalism, is really what people are looking for, right? They're looking for that professional base and connection.

16:23

Okay, next section, we're gonna talk about the reader's psychology. Okay, why, readers seek thought leadership content, which is what we just said. Right, people are looking for that shortcut. They don't wanna have to go through all of the muddle to get from A to B. I mean, I know I don't, right. So that's why I buy some books is that I want to figure out hey, how do I get from A to B faster or better or more efficiently? Hey, we're all going to make mistakes going from A to B, but we don't want to make the same mistakes the author made. So that's one of the great ways to figure out hey, what's this mistake this author made? How can I avoid that? And that's gonna save me time, effort, money and stress, right, so that's one of the things. Okay, so that's one of the reasons why people seek thought leadership content. It's also because if they trust you and then and they know you from other platforms they're gonna say, oh, I know this person, I'm gonna buy their book. I really love their YouTube channel, I really love their podcast, and their book is going to be more of the same, right, because they're going to be writing about the topic they have, most likely on their YouTube channel or their podcast channel.

17:24

All right, information consumption patterns have evolved in the digital age and this is huge. So one of the big things that have evolved in the digital age is more people will buy an e-book than a paperback, which kind of blows my mind as a published author. As much as I love digital productivity and I mean I have a whole bunch of Apple stuff, I've got my Mac computer, I've got my iPhone, I have my iPad, I have them all synced together I love using computer productivity for wherever I can. However, when it comes to certain things like ideation and things, I like to have a pen and paper, and when it comes to reading, I love physical paper. I do not like reading on a Kindle or an e-reader. I definitely read digital content online, like news stories and videos, but I don't typically read books. Actually, I don't read books as an ebook. I will only read them as a print book. So that's a really big distinguishment for myself, right?

18:22

So that's one of the ways that it's changed, because before, when I was a kid growing up, there were no ebooks. You just went to the bookstore and bought a book, or you went to the library and checked out a book. There were no audio books. There were oh, actually, no, I lied, there are audio books, but they were on 8-track or cassette tape and you had to buy this huge binder of cassette tapes to get audio books, which was crazy. I mean, you spent a lot of money on those too. They were not cheap because they were physical cassette tapes and if you are before the age of physical cassette tapes, those are the, the little. They kind of like credit card sized tapes where you would make mix tapes on. In the 80s as a kid I did that, and then they had before that they had eight tracks which are probably at the size of a large piece of bread and they would audio record things for you. But you had to buy. That was the first audio boxes you were bought, like these huge boxes of cassettes that were ginormous and you'd have to carry them around with you. Everywhere was not audio.

19:16

So the yeah, how people consume content is so different nowadays, right, Like YouTube videos and things. You couldn't be able to publish something immediately or go live when I was a kid that I mean, the only news stations did that. So a lot of people love that live consumption they can get. As a producer you can get a lot of information out there live, and as a consumer, you can see a lot of stuff as well live, which is really exciting because it's happening right then, as you're talking to that person.

19:48

Then what makes content memorable and influential from a cognitive perspective is one is definitely stories, okay, so your own personal stories interjected in there. I try to do that as much as possible with my podcast here and I try to make sure that those stories are obviously relevant to the material that I'm talking about. You don't want to have a story if it's good, if it's not relative to the material, but you do want to connect with your reader. Okay, so that's another psychological thing. Is making your content memorable and influential Because you want to connect with your reader. Okay, so that's another psychological thing is making your content memorable and influential because you want to connect with your reader with stories. You want to connect with your reader through experiences, like maybe they've had a similar experience to you with your struggles, like people love connecting with struggles. So if you have some struggles, definitely talk about that in your content.

20:32

All right, next section we're gonna talk about we're gonna talk about strategic publishing plan. So you want to create content that aligns with the psychological principles of influence that we just talked about and then choosing publishing formats based on audience psychology. Now, you always want to publish an ebook. If you're going to do one type of publication, publish it in ebook because that's going to sell the most. Okay, you can publish it in paperback. You don't have to pay extra to publish in paperback and to publish an ebook on Amazon. You can also publish your ebook on Apple. There's other platforms you can publish on, like Goodreads, which I recommend to publish on as well, but you want to make sure that your content aligns with all of these principles we just talked about and chooses publishing formats based on that.

21:17

Okay, where are your people hanging out? Frequency and consistency find that sweet spot with the consistency. And, beyond the metrics, what are those indicators of thought leadership? So I mean metrics is easy, right? So you look at your video, count and see oh, this video has gotten 500 views, or this video has gotten 10 views, right, you can see, relative to your other videos, which ones are working. Same thing with podcasts. So on my Captivate, which is my podcast host, which I, if you're listening to this on audio, that's the one I go through and I can see on my stats which episodes are getting the most listens and how much these people are listening. You guys are listening to each episode, which is one of the reasons why I keep my episodes short, under half an hour. So that's something to look at is metrics.

22:02

But how are people responding to your content, right? So what are the questions or comments that they're putting? That's part of the psychological aspect of it as well. So what are the comments they're talking about in your thought leadership? Are they saying good things? Are they saying constructive things? Are they saying negative things in the comments? Look at those and really think about what your followers are saying. All right, so remember we have discussed some key psychological principles. We've got some action steps for you guys. Make sure, if you have any questions, definitely reach out to me rightforyoume be happy to answer them.

22:36

Okay, but before we completely wrap up today's episode, I want to invite you to join our magical circle of writers in the publishing for professionals community. If you're a professional on the journey to becoming a published author, this free community is going to be your creative sanctuary, to connect with fellow writers who understand your publishing dreams, get invaluable self-publishing support and access our treasure trove of free self-publishing videos. It's like having a supportive writing family right at your fingertips. Make sure to hit the subscribe or follow button because if you are one of my first 100 community members, you're going to get a special gift Now. The community has not launched yet. It's going to launch starting episode 16.

23:15

But you want to hit the follow subscribe button now because if you don't, and you forget to listen to episode 16, you won't know how to get into my founder's circle of 100 people to get that free gift. And it's going to be a fabulous free gift. You're going to absolutely love it and it's going to be I'll give you a little hint it's going to be something to do with self-publishing. So definitely make sure you hit that like, follow and subscribe button. Leave a review while you're at it so you can be one of my first 100 community members to get this special gift. Okay, until next week. This is Lynn “Elikqitie” Smargis, reminding you to keep writing, keep dreaming and keep creating. Your book is waiting to be born.